I was thinking about writing another Christmas-themed blog as we head toward the Big Day, but then I saw a chyron crawl across the bottom of the TV screen the other day that said RFK's lawyer has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.
What the bloody hell...?
Here we go. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is president-elect Donald Trump's nomination to head up the US Department of Health and Human Services. Aaron Siri is the lawyer affiliated with Kennedy who filed the petition in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit that challenges the safety of vaccines and vaccine mandates under the guise of "medical freedom."
The key word here seems to be "informed."
I am 73 years old, soon to be 74, and I remember back in the 1950s – probably around 1956 or '57 – when we were given little pink sugar cubes in elementary school. The sugar cube was the delivery device, and the pink coloring was the actual polio vaccine. Mmm, sugar. I probably would have ingested the whole tray if they hadn't told me to take just one.
And now, decades later, we know what sugar can do for us, right?
At any rate, it must have worked. I didn't get polio, and neither did millions of others. I take that as empirical evidence that the vaccine worked.
So now along comes Kennedy, an acknowledged vaccine skeptic, and his lawyer 70 years later indicating that further testing of the inactivated polio vaccine is needed. The inactivated vaccine is different than the oral vaccine in that it is injected and doesn't use a live version of the virus like the oral vaccine did. It doesn't stop the virus itself, but rather helps the immune system to recognize and fight the virus. The inactivated version has been in use for decades with startling success, but Siri is arguing that there were no placebo-controlled clinical trials to prove the safety of the inactivated vaccine.
The thing is, most placebo-controlled trials are considered unethical because there is a percentage of the participants who would not get the shot – and thus be susceptible to contracting the disease.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader and a polio survivor himself, stated on Friday that "the polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and has held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uniformed (there's that word again), they're dangerous."
The FDA is reviewing Siri's petition, but if Kennedy is confirmed as the head of HHS, he could intervene in the petition review process. Great. A nonmedical person making uninformed medical decisions for us. This is the kind of government nearly 50 percent of us voted for because they argued price of the eggs was too high.
As it is, vaccination rates have been falling in this country, which might correlate to a rise in whooping cough and measles. One of the vaccines Siri wants to withdraw is for hepatitis B.
I don't know if Siri's petition will succeed. It very well may not. But after decades of success, why are these vaccines even being reviewed at all? And if they are being reviewed, there's a chance that under an autocratic government with a politicized Supreme Court, these life-saving vaccines could disappear, just like Roe v. Wade did. It's just another form of control, and it's happening right in front of us.
Merry Christmas.
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